The growing demand for multifunctional nanophotonic devices has led to the exploration, and utilization, of a plethora of exotic electro-optical materials. Recently, chalcogenide glass based phase change materials (PCMs) have shown utility as a tuning material for a range of nanophotonic devices. Owing to their low loss, ultrafast switching speeds and wide waveband operation, PCMs are integrated in an increasing number of next-generation tunable components, including integrated photonic switches, metasurface optics and tunable spectral filters. Nonetheless, modelling of PCM-based devices is challenging—both in terms of accurate representation of experimentally derived material properties in different phase states, and standardization of results across the research community. Further, as each device requires optimization of specific performance metrics dependent on their respective application, any inaccuracies will lead to erroneous outcomes. In this work, we introduce PCM-net (http://nekocloud.com/pnet/): an online database of the complex refractive indices of a variety of chalcogenide glass PCMs (such as GeSbTe), as an accessible and indexed repository for data sharing across the PCM community. Refractive indices (n) and extinction coefficients (k) between amorphous and crystalline states are directly extracted from experimentally derived data in numerous academic research articles, and collated into the material resource database. Due to the inaccuracies associated with our data collection methods, this data is supplemented with additional computationally generated data, obtained through WVASE —a commercial ellipsometry analysis software package. To demonstrate the utility of PCM-net, we provide a NASA application-driven device optimization example using the optical properties of PCMs collected with our database. We anticipate the database providing great use to the PCM community and coordinated research efforts enabled by PCM-net will promote the shared repository for the selection of appropriate PCMs for tunable nanophotonic device design for a range of applications.

对多功能纳米光子器件不断增长的需求导致了对大量奇特电光材料的探索和利用。最近，基于硫属化物玻璃的相变材料 (PCM) 已显示出可用作一系列纳米光子器件的调谐材料。由于其低损耗、超快开关速度和宽波段操作，PCM 被集成到越来越多的下一代可调谐组件中，包括集成光子开关、超表面光学器件和可调谐光谱滤波器。尽管如此，基于 PCM 的设备的建模仍然具有挑战性——无论是在不同相状态下实验得出的材料特性的准确表示方面，还是在整个研究界的结果标准化方面。更远，由于每个设备都需要根据各自的应用优化特定的性能指标，因此任何不准确都会导致错误的结果。在这项工作中，我们介绍了 PCM-net (http://nekocloud.com/pnet/)：各种硫属化物玻璃 PCM（例如 GeSbTe）的复折射率的在线数据库，作为可访问和索引的存储库整个 PCM 社区的数据共享。折射率 (n ) 和非晶态和晶态之间的消光系数 ( k ) 直接从众多学术研究文章中的实验导出数据中提取，并整理到材料资源数据库中。由于与我们的数据收集方法相关的不准确，这些数据补充有额外的计算生成的数据，通过 WVASE 获得——商业椭偏分析软件包。为了演示 PCM-net 的效用，我们提供了一个 NASA 应用驱动设备优化示例，使用我们的数据库收集的 PCM 的光学特性。我们预计该数据库将为 PCM 社区提供极大的帮助，并且 PCM-net 支持的协调研究工作将促进共享存储库，以便为一系列应用选择合适的 PCM 以进行可调谐纳米光子器件设计。